The Sirens of Space by Jeffrey Caminsky Read Free Book Online Page A

shipping
lanes, and when the only excitement a ship’s skipper was likely to
have was chasing after pirate raiding parties or rescuing ships
trapped in interstellar squalls. Most of all, he missed the days
when Central Command forgot about the Eastern Fleet for months at a
time and let him run his command as it should be run: with no
interference, and without the current abundance of addle-brained
experimentation.
    These days, CentCom was forever finding new
ways to complicate life on the frontier, he thought angrily. The
desk jockeys running things obviously did not understand the
realities of space exploration. Like this latest bit of nonsense:
how could a starship in deep space spend the stationary hours
needed to transmit across fifty parsecs or more? And they wouldn’t
just be solar hours. It would take two full cosmic hours to
broadcast a typical report on a low frequency band across the
distances ships traveled on a typical mission. If they broadcast
often enough, they might as well give the aliens their code book,
for all the good it would do. It was lame-brained from the charts
to the docks, and he simply would not stand for it.
    Today, though, he had bigger problems
on his mind. Now that the first Challengers were on their way, they needed crews
and, more importantly, new captains to command them. He’d put off
convening the promotions board for as long as he could, but was
running out of time. No matter how much squawking Winthrop
Weatherlee would put them through, they had to decide whom to
promote. And that meant problems—political problems, that had no
place in making command decisions.
    What frustrated Clay more than
anything was that Weatherlee—Old Blunderbutt they called him in the
back rooms of the Eastern Fleet—had him in a corner this time. As
much as Clay hated to admit it, he’d have to pass over his best
cruiser commander once again. Weatherlee, the admiral in charge of
Demeter Command, had raised hell all the way back to Covington
when the last set of promotions had come through, even after they
struck the young Isitian from the list. Now, with the peace talks
still moving at a snail’s pace, the conciliatory stance Clay had
taken with the Crutchtans had the frontier politicians calling for
his head more loudly than ever. Even in a less forbidding climate,
Weatherlee would never stand for giving one of the Challengers to a commander he wanted
blackballed, not without a nasty fight. Once again, Clay couldn’t
afford the heat; and once again, the talented young officer’s
career—whose progress through the ranks was becoming as interesting
to Clay as to his own Demetrian rival— would find itself
stalled.
    What galled the admiral most was the utter
pointlessness of Weatherlee’s feud. Ornery as he was, Old
Blunderbutt had never before shown the visceral dislike he aimed at
this particular blueshirt. From the start, Weatherlee had sought to
block the young man’s rise through the ranks, all the more so after
it became obvious that the lad was the most promising officer in
the fleet. Now, each new demonstration of brilliance by the young
Isitian forced Weatherlee to reach further and further to justify
himself. The Demetrian nearly shot through the roof when the young
man’s promotion to full commander came through in the aftermath of
the Hawkins Massacre; when prejudice joined with real or imagined
personal grievance, thought Clay, the result was
uncontrollable.
    Yet for all of Weatherlee’s shortcomings,
the Demetrian was an able backroom politician with well-placed
friends, both in and out of the command structure. Though Clay was
often hailed as the bravest line commander of his generation, in
his heart he knew he was just the smartest, and now was not the
time to mount an assault. For now, the matter would sit: the best
cruiser commander Clay had ever seen would remain blackballed by a
vindictive superior. With all of Terra raging over firestorms that
the frontier politicians fanned